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Australasian Spartacist No. 213
Winter 2011
Federal Budget Pummels the Poor
ALP Government's War on Workers and Oppressed
We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!
From its draconian anti-union legislation to its brutal treatment of refugees and bloody militarism abroad, the minority federal ALP government, propped up by the Greens and “independents,” is an enemy of working people and the oppressed. That this government is thoroughly dedicated to administering in the interests of the Australian capitalist rulers was driven home yet again by the May federal budget. In aiming to slash $22 billion in spending over the next four years, the budget is framed to make workers and the poor pay for the massive deficit racked up by the government in its attempts to “save capitalism” with the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Pushing mantras such as getting the budget “back in the black,” the government is targeting the neediest for cruel welfare cuts. In some cases this will not only threaten the livelihoods but the very lives of recipients. Under punitive new regulations access to the disabilities pension will be sharply curtailed. Disabled people deemed capable of working by the government are threatened with losing their pensions unless they submit to demeaning quarterly Centrelink interviews to prove they have been looking for work. Unemployed youth under 21 years of age will lose $43 a week from their benefits while poverty-stricken single parents (overwhelmingly women) will have their paltry pensions slashed by $56 per week when their child turns twelve. Alongside this, the government aims to slash more than 1,200 jobs from Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support services. These attacks on the poor take place as the cost of living for basic items such as electricity, water, groceries, education, health and accommodation are escalating. With soaring housing costs, including skyrocketing rents, thousands have been thrown onto the streets. As for public transport and hospitals, they sink deeper into disrepair.
Meanwhile the government’s punitive and racist welfare “quarantining” that accompanied the 2007 police and military occupation of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is being extended to more communities in Queensland and Western Australia. This extension of welfare “quarantining,” which in NT Aboriginal communities combines with puritanical prohibition on alcohol and pornography, is in the service of an ever-increasing state intervention into the lives of the oppressed and working people.
Prime Minister Gillard openly competes with the Liberal/National opposition leader Tony Abbott over who can put forward the most reactionary social and economic policies. The current budget cuts targeting single parents and unemployed youth are designed to reinforce the grip of the family on women and youth. A key prop for the maintenance of capitalist rule and source of women’s oppression, the institution of the family, backed by church and state, is upheld to instil conservative obedience to the “values” of bourgeois morality and to raise the next generation of wage slaves for industry and cannon fodder for future imperialist wars. In Australia, where wife-beating is rife and a woman is killed almost every week by a male partner or ex-partner, the cuts to the single-parent benefit will help drive women and children back to the horror of domestic violence. Meanwhile, as the mining giants and banks rake in record profits, the bourgeois media is aggressively demanding deeper cuts to welfare as the ruling class worries about the effects of a future bust of the resources boom on the budget bottom line.
In representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, Gillard has long been a crusader against welfare. In 2007, speaking at a meeting of the Sydney Institute, she announced, “The old days of passive welfare for those able to contribute are gone.” Today this threat comes under the guise of what she now calls “The Dignity of Work.” This is the modern version of the cruder “dole bludgers” moniker used to single out, blame and victimise the unemployed and all welfare recipients for the failings of the capitalist system to provide decent education, training and jobs. Thus the budget also targeted the estimated 230,000 long-term unemployed, who will be required to do 11 months of work-for-the-dole or lose their payments from July next year.
By forcing people off welfare the government aims to create an even larger pool of desperate people for the bosses to ruthlessly exploit and to use as a wedge to drive down the conditions of all workers. With workers shackled at every turn by the union tops’ kow-towing to Labor’s anti-union legislation, for many the “dignity of work” means being exploited in a casual and/or part-time job for barely subsistence wages under a dictatorial boss, usually backed by vicious supervisors who enforce unsafe working conditions. Hundreds of workers are killed every year at work. Amidst this increasing denigration and brutalisation of the working class, slashing of welfare and blaming the victims of this irrational profit-gouging system, the budget assured a new round of company tax cuts.
All over the capitalist world, workers have been suffering the impact of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With unemployment and house foreclosures threatening the lives of millions, capitalist governments have ramped up union-busting attacks and vicious austerity measures. In response, workers across Europe, from Britain, to Spain, France and Greece, have mobilised in massive defensive struggles, including strikes and protests, against these attacks. But, simultaneously, the misleaders of the working class have pushed parliamentary reformist illusions and virulent protectionism. This serves to tie the proletariat and their unions to “their” own capitalist rulers while whipping up racist reaction and dividing workers along national lines.
Resources Boom Masks Rotting Capitalist System
In Australia, the effects of the global economic crisis have been masked by the ongoing massive demand for resources, above all by the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, which has pushed the terms of trade to the highest level in 140 years. But the economy that exists outside the resources sector is stagnant or going backwards. And it is being made sicker by the resources boom, which has sent the dollar soaring, creating inflationary pressures and driving up the cost of exports. Together these factors have contributed to downturns in retail, construction and manufacturing.
Exacerbated by recent natural disasters, the Australian economy just experienced its biggest quarterly contraction in 20 years. And it is the workers who are being made to pay. The official unemployment rate of 4.9 percent hides the real level of joblessness, estimated at around 6.9 percent and growing daily. Hardly a week goes by where a manufacturing plant or retail store doesn’t close and/or hundreds don’t lose their jobs. In June, the clothing chain Colorado announced that it would close 140 stores across the country, shedding more than 1,000 jobs. More than 100,000 jobs have disappeared in manufacturing in the last three years.
The ALP government, with help from the pro-capitalist trade-union tops, has held the economic crisis up as a club against workers’ struggles, arguing that any proletarian struggle would sabotage the national economy. Such nationalist class-collaborationist poison serves to derail class struggle by instilling in the proletariat the lie that workers, who are forced to sell their labour power to survive, and the capitalists, who grow fat profiting from the wealth produced by the workers, have fundamental interests in common.
There is a burning need for class-struggle opposition to the bourgeoisie’s onslaughts. With its hands on the levers of production the proletariat uniquely has the potential social power and interest to sweep away this irrational exploitative system. What’s needed is a revolutionary workers party that fights to unleash the proletariat’s social power in a struggle not just for its own class interests but for all the oppressed. Based on the understanding that the interests of the working class and the capitalist rulers are irreconcilably counterposed, such a leadership would not only seek to defend and improve the present conditions of the proletariat but fight to lead the working class in sweeping away the entire system of capitalist wage slavery.
The only way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, when the workers took power in their own hands, seizing the banks, the factories, mines, mills and other means of production from the hands of the capitalists, and established a proletarian state based on workers soviets (councils) and an internationalist program. It will take world socialist revolution, leading to the collectivisation of the means of production and economic planning on an international scale, to provide a future for humanity.
For a Class-Struggle Fight Against Racist Capitalism
While slashing welfare, Labor’s federal budget also showered in excess of one billion dollars on “border security,” including the vile campaign to demonise and punish the small numbers of refugees arriving by boat. The mandatory and long-term incarceration of refugees in inhumane detention centres, often ending in deportation, has driven many detainees to repeated desperate protests (see article, page 1). The May budget coincided with the Labor government announcing its despicable proposed deal with the Malaysian government to barter 800 asylum seekers currently in detention in Australia for “resettling” 1,000 refugees per year from Malaysia for the next four years. The bourgeoisie’s hysterical campaign against refugees is being used to promote xenophobic nationalism and inflame racial hostilities in order to keep the working class divided and to deflect it from the much needed struggle against the capitalist rulers who are driving down the conditions of all. Sharp opposition to racism and chauvinism is vital to the unity and integrity of the working class and to combat the bosses’ divide-and-rule schemes. We say: Down with the bi-partisan war on refugees! No deportations! Close the detention camps! Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here!
There is deep-seated worker hostility to the capitalist rulers’ all-sided attacks. On 8 June, thousands of women community sector workers, who assist the disabled and downtrodden, marched for equal pay in major cities across the country. A week later, angry New South Wales public sector workers rallied in their thousands against the Liberal state government’s legislation effectively imposing pay cuts. Pilots, engineers and transport workers are seething at Qantas management’s union-busting attempts to outsource jobs and drive down working conditions. And waterside workers, fed up with unsafe work conditions, have struck against the vicious union-busters at Patrick Stevedores.
To carry out the needed class-struggle fight against the government’s and bosses’ anti-worker attacks requires a political struggle against the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats who channel workers’ anger into support for the ALP and the bosses’ courts while sowing nationalism and protectionist poison. In May, when Patrick Stevedores provocatively closed down its container terminals and refused to pay wharfies in response to union bans in defence of job safety and a wage rise, the hidebound MUA bureaucrats quickly took a dive. Faced with Patrick’s provocation, they called off the bans and appealed to the “national” interest, seeking to appease the exporters who were baying for union blood. MUA national secretary, Paddy Crumlin, grovelled “We’ve listened to the concerns of the rural community and responded accordingly,” while his deputy, Mick Doleman, played the nationalist card railing that Patrick was “unAustralian” and “owns the decision to shut down the ports...” (“MUA Saves Patrick from itself,” MUA web site, 27 May). The MUA tops’ response is a far cry from the militant class-struggle actions—including solid strikes with mass pickets to shut down the ports—that helped build the waterfront unions. As the bosses’ labour lieutenants, union bureaucrats throughout the country have increasingly sacrificed class-struggle weapons. As a result, the union movement has shrunk to only 18 percent of the workforce as the bosses escalate their attacks.
Rather than mobilising their worker base in a fight against the capitalist rulers, the union tops invest great energy and purpose into promoting the bosses’ reactionary defence of state and nation. In the face of Qantas management’s open union-busting threats, Transport Workers Union honcho Tony Sheldon recently linked his opposition to Qantas’ attempts to cut costs by outsourcing labour, to “security” and “border protection” at Australian airports. As reported in the Weekend Australian Financial Review (7-8 May), Sheldon despicably ranted at a recent union-sponsored aviation forum that “there were ‘gaping holes’ in the system for ensuring that workers allowed into the secure sections of airports were subject to background checks and held an Aviation Security Identity Card.” Pro-capitalist to the core, Sheldon told the AFR that he was “of the strong view, to put to our delegates and our members, that we should take industrial action over that matter because it’s fundamental to frontline security of the aviation industry and it’s one that Qantas has avoided for a very long time.”
Helping to enforce the “security” of fortress “White Australia” is the kiss of death for the trade unions. It buys into the government’s reactionary “war on terror,” which has not only served to divide the working class by whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hatred, but has shredded civil liberties while greatly expanding the repressive powers of the state, targeting all working people. The draconian powers of the witchhunting Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which targets militant construction unionists for persecution and fines, are modelled on “anti-terror” laws introduced under the former Liberal/Coalition government of John Howard with the avid backing of the ALP Opposition.
In seeking to endear themselves to the bourgeoisie by trumpeting their defence of national borders and “protecting” Australian industry, class-collaborationist union misleaders poison potential for working-class solidarity at home and with workers’ struggles abroad. Understanding that it is not overseas workers but the irrational capitalist system that causes unemployment and exploitation, a class-struggle leadership of the unions would take up the fight to defend jobs at the bosses’ expense and seek to unite the employed and unemployed in common struggles around common demands. In opposition to sackings it would fight for jobs for all through a shorter work week at no loss in pay and for a massive program of public works to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of decaying capitalist society. It would fight to organise non-unionised workers and for union hiring and training, with all workers (women, youth and immigrants) on union wages and conditions.
A revolutionary leadership would be first and foremost internationalist. In fighting for solidarity actions between workers across national boundaries, it would draw on immigrant workers’ experience of class struggle abroad and their living links to workers overseas. It would stand sharply opposed to the union tops’ nationalist bile and cringing loyalty to the capitalist state. Consisting at its core of the military, police, prisons and courts, the bourgeois state is an instrument of organised violence that exists to defend the capitalist exploiters against the strivings of the proletariat and oppressed. As Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin explained in his powerful 1917 treatise, The State and Revolution, the capitalist state cannot be reformed or wielded in the interests of the working class and oppressed; it must be shattered through workers revolution.
Not Laborite Reformism But a Communist Perspective
Following the release of the budget, the reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism brayed in unison about the attacks by Labor. “Federal Budget 2011-12 Lies and deception” wrote the Communist Party’s The Guardian. “Budget 2011: A budget for billionaires” declared Green Left Weekly. In their article “Desperately seeking surplus,” Socialist Alternative (SAlt) sagely warned “By embracing the rhetoric about public debt and the importance of budget surplus, the Gillard government has signalled the likelihood of more savage cuts in the future....” True enough. But who do the cynical hacks who lead these organisations think they are kidding? For all their moaning about the federal ALP government’s attacks, these reformist groups gave back-handed support to the ALP in last October’s federal elections through the preferential voting system or, in the case of SAlt, simply advocated “giving a first preference vote to either Labor, the Greens or others who are genuinely left-wing...” (SAlt election statement, 9 July 2010).
The CPA, Socialist Alliance and SAlt, each with their own particular brand of liberal-reformist program, all push the lie that, with enough pressure from the masses, the capitalist state, particularly when administered by Labor, can serve the interests of the working class. But whichever party is in power under capitalism it serves to administer capitalism on behalf of the capitalist class. In contrast, fighting for an independent proletarian-centred program, we in the Spartacist League forthrightly called for “No Vote to Labor! No Vote to Bourgeois Greens!” in the 2010 elections. Noting that both the Liberal/National Coalition and Labor were in a reactionary race to sell themselves to the capitalist rulers we wrote, “For the working class and oppressed, the only thing on offer in the upcoming Australian federal election is more capitalist austerity and reaction” (see “‘White Australia’ Elections: Racism, Austerity, Repression,” ASp No. 210, Spring 2010).
We fight to win militant workers, revolutionary-minded youth and anti-racist fighters to the perspective of building a revolutionary workers party. Such a party can only be built in opposition to, and in struggle against, the politics of the ALP and Laborite trade-union bureaucrats who sap and derail the fighting power of the working class by pushing the lie that there can be a partnership between labour and capital. The ALP is what Marxists term a bourgeois workers party, historically based on the trade unions but thoroughly committed to maintaining the capitalist order. It is necessary to replace the misleaders in the unions with a class-struggle leadership, linked to a multiracial revolutionary workers party that is committed to smashing capitalist rule and establishing a new social order run by those who produce the wealth: the working class.
The drive to extract ever greater profit from workers’ labour, the racist oppression of Aboriginal people and refugees, the blood-drenched imperialist carnage from Iraq to Afghanistan, the all-sided social bigotry targeting women and gays—all these are part of the system of capitalist rule. That system must be destroyed root and branch by workers revolution. Proletarian seizure of state power would abolish private ownership of the means of production, collectivise industry and establish a planned socialist economy. Only then will the wealth and productive capacity of society serve the needs of the majority and not the profits of a tiny layer. Ultimately only international working-class rule based on the fight for communism can eliminate the poverty, oppression and misery endemic to this decaying and barbaric capitalist order.
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